I’m a trash monster who loves watching The Bachelorette and judging people. This season has provoked a lot of think pieces, and this one about how the season wrapped up is worth a look, if only because it provides a more unique perspective:

Over the course of the season, it became clearer and clearer that the decision to cast a black bachelorette was merely evidence of the network’s interest in pushing faux-colorblind love stories as fairy-tale fantasies; the show failed to account for the ways that race would complicate the existing narrative, including the real challenges that interracial couples experience—especially black women who date nonblack men. I was confounded by the ways the men (both black and white) talked about Rachel as an anomaly. The subtext of their praise seemed to imply that it is unusual for black women to be smart, beautiful, or successful, let alone at the same damn time.

This has been making the rounds this week, and it’s an important piece about how we (white people) use GIFs without thinking about how we might be contributing to damaging images of black people as a result. It’s a fascinating piece, and it’s thought-provoking and worth your time:

Now, I’m not suggesting that white and nonblack people refrain from ever circulating a black person’s image for amusement or otherwise (except maybe lynching photos, Emmett Till’s casket, and videos of cops killing us, y’all can stop cycling those, thanks). There’s no prescriptive or proscriptive step-by-step rulebook to follow, nobody’s coming to take GIFs away. But no digital behavior exists in a deracialized vacuum. We all need to be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from “real life.” The Internet isn’t a fantasy — it’s real life.

I’m active on Twitter, and I consider myself firmly on the pulse of what’s going on in the book community, but I grew tired of the infighting and petty dramas a long time ago, so I stopped following most YA authors and most book bloggers and started focusing on other things. This piece by Kat Rosenfeld investigates how toxic YA Twitter has remained, and it’s fascinating, no matter how you feel about Rosenfeld (who is no stranger to Twitter controversy).

She focuses largely on the response to one book, but it’s also about a larger issue within the Twitter bubble and callout culture:

It’s also a process in which tough questions lie ahead — including how callout culture intersects with ordinary criticism, if it does at all. Some feel that condemning a book as “dangerous” is no different from any other review, while others consider it closer to a call for censorship than a literary critique.

I read the entire thing with this weird pit in my stomach. It’s worth a read.

What articles did you read this week that got you thinking?

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